Villages

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, the icemen were busy here. Twenty-five years ago, the district’s congressman and a U.S. senator expressed disgust at Brookhaven National Lab contamination.

Winter can often be the deadliest time of the year, but there are ways to protect yourself and your home from cold-related accidents.

One hundred and sixty-eight years ago, on Jan. 21, 1854, Capt. Jared Wade Jr. (1811-1889) wrote to his wife, Harriett Bushnell Wade (1831-1911), from St. Helena Island. This British island in the South Atlantic served as an important stopping-off port for the whaling and shipping industry.

The screech owl is about the size of a brick, with big eyes, and ear tufts, but this adorable little owl is an efficient killer. Its howl represents pure death to a variety of critters. Nothing is safe, even other screech owls. It even takes bats on the wing.

When a man with a gun took a rabbi and three members of his congregation as hostages at the Beth Israel Congregation in Colleyville, Texas, on Saturday — a situation that the hostages survived, but the gunman did not — ripples of resolve ran through Jewish houses of worship here.

While the pandemic’s trajectory remains uncertain, the Omicron variant’s tendency to cause milder sickness, combined with the sheer number of those with a degree of protection through prior infection or vaccination, signal a period of transition for the virus that has upended life for the past two years.

From memories of whalemen to postwar bouts of card playing.

Within a year after a 1978 fire that burned the Sea Spray Inn in East Hampton to the ground, village residents voted to buy the 16-acre property and to add the land and its 10 cottages to the village’s roster of parks and recreational sites. In recent weeks, there's been talk of changes at property, including whether it would be advantageous to turn their management over to a private company, which would then be responsible for their upkeep.

The Omicron variant of Covid-19 continues to surge through Suffolk County, but there may be signs of a coming decline in cases, which reached an all time high last week.

This photograph from the C. Frank Dayton Photograph Collection shows the exterior of the blacksmith shop of Charles Silas Parsons (1858-1926) before its relocation and restoration.

More and more people are visiting health professionals to discuss anxiety and depression, and what's striking is not the new onset of these symptoms and conditions or the severity with which they are presenting but instead that so many people are almost apologetic when they bring up these concerns.

Why isn’t the long-tailed duck more celebrated? It’s crazy looking, gregarious, easily seen, cackles like a stuttering kazoo, hilariously belly-flops when it lands, and hangs out in bad little duck posses. It’s even controversial.

“We’ve been a community center since 1908 and have never had a proper bathroom,” said Hilary Osborn Malecki, president of the Wainscott Sewing Society, which maintains the Wainscott Chapel. The chapel has existed all this time with only an outhouse, but that is about to change.

Deep into The Star’s past . . .

This photograph, taken by Leonard L. Lester, shows the East Hampton Presbyterian Church covered in a thick blanket of snow. There’s no date, but the photo technology clearly indicates that it was taken after 1920, most likely between 1930 and 1960, when a remodeling was started.

As we enter a new year and come upon the second anniversary of the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is time once again to review the most current guidelines for testing, quarantine after exposure, and isolation while infected with Covid-19. This is particularly necessary as the Centers for Disease Control recently updated their guidelines to reflect the latest known data about the rising Omicron variant, which has spread at an incredible pace.

Starting Monday, anyone traveling through the heart of Sag Harbor Village might experience traffic snarls, as National Grid begins replacing the gas main underneath Main Street. Workers will be on site between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Spurred by an avalanche of positive Covid-19 cases over the holiday season among families, kids, and teachers, virus-related impacts have been fast and furious in coming to South Fork schools.

Ripped from the storied pages of The Star . . .

The push to expand access to Covid-19 vaccines continues on the South Fork, with East Hampton Town adding five additional vaccination clinics in February and Stony Brook Southampton Hospital moving its clinics to the Greek Orthodox Church of the Hamptons to accommodate more appointments.

Founded in 2005 by Douglas Mercer, the Wellness Foundation announced its closing just before Christmas. The organization worked closely with local school districts, helping to make healthy food a priority, and ran Wellness Challenges for adults that encouraged a holistic approach toward a healthier lifestyle.

The first day of the new year was drizzly and drab, and, to some, depressing, though you wouldn’t have known it had you been at East Hampton Village’s Main Beach or at the Beach Lane road end in Wainscott for the New Year’s Day plunges that afternoon.

The Village Preservation Society of East Hampton has awarded a $5,000 grant to the Anchor Society of East Hampton, a recently formed nonprofit organization seeking to open a year-round general store in the village that would offer daily necessities as well as a haven for neighbors to meet and greet each other

When he leaves East Hampton for retirement, Richard Barons will leave behind big shoes to fill — most likely a pair of shoes dating back to the 18th or 19th century, donated by a family that lived here for generations and whose original owner, judging by the worn soles, might have been a merchant or a schoolteacher.

The peninsula separating Accabonac Harbor and Gardiner’s Bay is known as Gerard Drive today, but over the years it has had many different names.

As the highly contagious Omicron variant emerges as the dominant strain of Covid-19 infecting New Yorkers, comments from weary physicians here underscored the surprising speed with which the virus has been spreading.

A La Mode Shoppe, a handcrafted, small-batch, allergy-free ice cream operation, has announced it will take over the space on Newtown Lane formerly occupied by the popular Scoop du Jour.

Many of us are once again struggling with a sense that this pandemic will never end. History tells us this isn’t the case, that this pandemic, like all of the others that have come before, will eventually cease and life will return to some semblance of “normal.”

Residential real estate transfers made history on the South Fork again in 2021, with record-high sales totals, record-low inventory, and a lightning-fast pace at which deals are being made. It was a frenzied year, described by industry professionals as a seller's market in which cash is king, bidding wars are common, and inventory is low.

From the pages of Ye Olde Star.